ABSTRACT
Suburban change depends on the intersection of complex dynamics including a city’s history, demographic and income distributions, class and ethnic divisions, the presence of immigrant enclaves, and the real estate market. The contested perceptions and expressions of proper house design clearly vary among the diversity of suburban constituencies, from those who subscribe to a version of preservationist cosmology to those with very different ideas. A recurring issue has focused on whether North American suburbs are largely middle-class white enclaves. The preservation and restoration of older neighborhoods, however, is largely made possible by the coordinated efforts of government authorities and mostly middle-class residents, the same kind of actors who established the suburbs as “white” in the first place. Aesthetic guidelines employed in the southern California suburbs teach or coerce homeowners to make their house renovations conform to the city’s design ideal.
